Murray hits new heights: No need for any late-night heroics as Andy is done by teatime

Nobody missed the last bus this time. Nobody had to scramble for a taxi or scrap for a vacant hotel room. Andy Murray, Captain Midnight to his SW19 devotees, had his quarter-final victory wrapped up by teatime, roof open, and earlier than he usually comes on to court.

His straight-sets win over Juan Carlos Ferrero, a former world No 1, was so assured, so comfortable, so comprehensive that it almost did not feel like watching a British tennis player in action. There was no hint of nerves, no cliffhanger sets, few games pulled back from the brink.

The one brief spell in which Ferrero excelled, at the start of the second set, only served to illustrate what a magnificent job Murray did to keep him subdued the rest of the time.

Here was the performance that suggests Murray can be Wimbledon champion after all. This was the day in which he finally broke free of the presumption that he would, like so many of his predecessors and one in particular, fail to deliver when it mattered.

In 2001, Tim Henman missed his greatest chance of winning Wimbledon by losing to Goran Ivanisevic, a wildcard, at the semi-final stage. Ferrero is wild here, too, and mighty dangerous considering his dismissal of two top 10 seeds, Gilles Simon and Fernando Gonzalez, on the way to the last eight, but he rarely posed a threat to Murray.

Rather, Murray put Ferrero in his place with his best tennis of the tournament, near-faultless serves and returns that placed his opponent in permanent risk of being broken. Murray took points in all of Ferrero’s service games, bar one. By contrast, in the first set, Ferrero took only four points off Murray’s serve.

The turning point came midway through the second set when Murray took his game to a new level, the way great players do, and blew Ferrero off court and as good as out of the competition. In that period, in which he broke his opponent twice, Murray won 18 points out of 19, a match-defining run that began in the fifth game and ended in the ninth and established a level of superiority that Ferrero did not come close to diminishing.

Smash, bang, wallop: Murray dispensed with Ferrero in an hour and 43 minutes

That it came after Ferrero’s most dominant spell — indeed, the only stretch of the match in which he looked capable of living with Murray — made the achievement all the more impressive. The finest players can raise their game almost to order. That was what Murray did here, having surrendered the first game of the set in surprising fashion with a rare unforced error into the net.

When Ferrero played a fabulous backhand pass to take the fifth game to deuce, there was a real danger that Murray could trail 4-1. Instead, he produced his A game, as the Americans call it, including a brilliant volley at full stretch at the net to hold serve.

When Murray turned the screw, Ferrero no longer appeared comfortable. He lost his next service game to love with a double fault, had little answer to Murray’s serve, double-faulted again at the beginning of the next game and was finally dispatched by a quite blistering service game that included three aces and a return that did not make it into play.

This was Murray’s peak at the tournament so far. It was the moment when the best marathon runner kicks for home leaving the field perspiring and grimacing in his wake, when the favourite emerges from the pack and bursts up the hill towards the winning post, the traditional Tiger Woods charge on the third day.

Ferrero is a Grand Slam winner and has been around the block a few times but as the set drew to a close and he swiped forlornly at thin air, with Murray in the ascendant, he looked done.

Done and dusted: Wildcard Ferrero's best run at Wimbledon for two years was ended in brutal fashion

‘He beat me in 10 minutes,’ Ferrero confirmed. ‘He won the set very fast, and then everything else happened very fast, too. At two sets down it was difficult to get myself up again; physically I felt very tired.’

Murray said: ‘I started to serve better, I was hitting my returns harder and reading his serve. If he had broken me, there is a good chance it would have been one set all.’

Instead, from there, it was a formality. Ferrero held his two service games at the beginning of the third set but, unable to make an impression on Murray’s serve, it was a matter of time before the match was wrapped up. In flashes, Ferrero showed the player he could be — a beautiful drop shot to take his third service game to deuce,for instance — but it only underlined the level of Murray’s performance, his brilliant returns, the forehand as effective as the backhand slice has been in previous matches.

By the end, Ferrero was spraying the ball into the crowd like a Twenty20 batsman as he sought to contain his opponent. Murray won 88 per cent of the points on his first serve, demonstrating a consistency that was almost alien to those who have followed the lone standard-bearers of British tennis to this stage of the tournament before.

It will be Murray’s first Wimbledon semi-final on Friday, but there will be no cooler presence on Centre Court; even with the roof closed.